[Sci-tech-public] Xaq Frolich wins 2011 STS Siegel Prize

[David Mindell]

Hello all,

 

I am pleased to announce that the this year's Siegel Prize goes to HASTS
graduate student Xaq Frolich for his paper "Imagining Consumers,
Constituting Subjects: Making Sense of "Consumer Confusion" and the history
of U.S. Nutrition Labeling."  

The Benjamin Siegel Prize of $2500 is offered to the MIT student submitting
the best written work on issues in science, technology, and society. The
prize is open to undergraduate and graduate students from any school or
department of the Institute. The prize was established in 1990 by family and
friends of the late Benjamin Siegel (S.B. 1938, Ph.D.)

In the words of the prize committee: "The nutritional information labels
that adorn every piece of packaged food sold in this country have become
mundane and familiar to American consumers. Their familiarity, however,
obscures a fascinating origin story.  In this superb paper that articulates
serious archival work and a sensibility for recent STS theories Xaq shows
how the labels came to be.  Their existence, content, and format are all the
result of fierce battles not just about science and public policy, but also
about notions of who consumers are, what they want to know, and what they 

can understand.  Xaq proves that STS scholarship can illuminate current
public policies and help understand the complex set of scientific and social
issues that agencies like FDA face when they design standards for the
American public."

 

The committee also named a runner up, Ms. Isabelle Anguelovski, a grad
student in MIT's Department of  Urban Studies and Planning for her paper
"Understanding the Dynamics of Community Engagement of Corporations in
Communities: The Iterative Relationship Between Dialogue Processes and Local
Protest at the Tintaya Copper Mine in Peru." 

 

In the words of the prize committee:

"Facing increasing scrutiny of their activities, mining companies and other
heavy industries have become increasingly willing to engage in dialogue and
other deliberate processes with the community groups that are affected by
their activities.  Even though these efforts seek  to address the concerns
of community members, some community activists actively resist the new
deliberative spaces.  In this insightful analysis of the interactions
between the company BHP Billiton and the communities around the Tintaya mine
in Peru, Isabelle shows how this resistance was not an effort to undermine
the dialogue, but to ensure that proper attention was paid to specific
concerns.  Isabelle's paper deftly integrates a range of theorists with her
interviews of key participants in order to broaden our understanding the
dynamics of corporation-community interactions in settings of environmental
conflict."

 

Please join me in congratulating Xaq and  Isabelle on this well-deserved
honor. Also thanks to David Jones and Vincent Lepinay for their service the
prize committee. 

 

Well done, Xaq and Isabelle! 

 

David

 

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